


more than earth

by brella



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Death Fix, Fix-It, Gen, file this under: FUCK YOU JEFF DAVIS AND ALL YOU STAND FOR
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 04:25:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1331830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia was raised to think, or to know, that death is permanent, and that people don't come back, and that funerals are the only goodbye you can't undo. And she tells herself to remember this, over and over. But one of the voices, now, is Allison's.</p><p>Or: Lydia Martin brings Allison Argent back from the dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	more than earth

**Author's Note:**

> I've done this kind of fic [before](http://archiveofourown.org/works/724091/chapters/1343346), and I'll do it again. That's all I have to say for myself.  
> That, and sincerest thanks to [Hilda Doolitle](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/eurydice-5/).

Lydia reads.

She reads, and turns the corners of pages down like they’re the beginnings of paper cranes, and bites down on her thumbs when they start to go numb. The soft in-betweens of her fingers have paper cuts in them, little thin red lines that go in all directions, and she doesn’t bandage them or wet them to stem the blood flow; she counts each new one as a trophy, as a sign that she is still awake, and still looking, and still learning.

Her teachers had always told her that she had a talent for learning, and for leadership. Her mother had always told her that she had a talent for hiding the bags under her eyes. Allison had always told her that she had a talent for _persistence_.

“I’m not buying the dress, Lydia,” Allison had insisted with a smile slowly beginning to lose its patience. The garment on the hanger she’d been holding up had been silver and sleek, more armor than gown. (The dress Lydia wears to her funeral is black and has long sleeves and itches her elbows.) “It’s two hundred dollars. I don’t have two hundred dollars.”

“Allison,” Lydia had retorted, plucking it out of her hand and stepping in close to better flash her a superior smile, “Is two hundred dollars not worth it for a dress that might as well have been made for you by the powers of the universe?”

Allison had rolled her eyes and Lydia, just to drive the point home, flippantly, had added, “After all,” and smiled; “You only live once.”  

Lydia has grown since then. She knows that you only live twice, three times, four times; you only live for as many times as hands pull you out of washtubs, and you only live for as many times as your skin closes around its blisters and wounds, and you only live for as many times as nemeton roots make way for fireflies. Lydia has acquainted herself with the wolves, and the beasts, and the voices. Lydia Martin is no longer so naive. She is on the chessboard; no, she is moving the pieces, and Allison is not off the board yet; she is just lost, lingering behind rooks, unused.

She guesses that, in retrospect, it might have looked insensitive for her not to have given any eulogy at the funeral. She rationalizes to herself that it had only been because she’d known there hadn’t been any need for it, because the ground on top of Allison is made to be disrupted, and the headstone is made to be chipped blank.

“There’s danger in this, Lydia,” Deaton tells her. Lydia barely looks at him as she stacks up volume after volume of Celtic resurrection myths, of Okuni-Nushi, of Balder.

“Danger in what?” she replies in the airiest tone she can muster, forcing the caring away from her pores because there’s no space for it among the clamor of resistance and denial and banshee-magic. “Reading? Trust me, I learned that the minute I opened _Lolita_.”

She swears she hears Deaton laugh a little. She should be offended, but she isn’t. Her arms twinge, sore, under the dusty stack. Her nostrils flare against the untouched grit.

“Danger in trying too hard,” Deaton explains, “To undo.”

Lydia turns to him, finally. The office is dark, but the full moon outside cleaves nacreous strips onto the floor and over the metal table, over the instruments of excision and repair, over the gauze and the needles and the spools of black thread. His arms are folded, and his unblinking brown eyes are set on her; their irises remind her of a tree stump she’d seen once, in the fifth grade, on a field trip, every ring of which Stiles had explained to her was another year of stretch and growth, another year for wisdom and for death. Saplings grow out of stumps, so Allison can grow out of the earth, unbidden, unbowed, hard dimples and winter-hair and unblemished skin.

“That’s funny coming from you.” Lydia smirks at him, remembering the unfazed nature of his gaze when she had felt the life seep out of Stiles’s shoulders, when she had nearly coughed up her own heart at the sight of Allison shuddering into stillness the next tub over. “Since the very basis of your job seems to be _undoing_ things. Or was the triple-sacrifice to the nemeton a recommended tactic in the emissary handbook?”

Deaton’s knowing smile doesn’t falter, which annoys her, but doesn’t surprise her.

“I don’t object to helping you,” he murmurs, “But I can only guide you so far. There are dark things waiting for you to lose your way in, Lydia, and if you decide to move toward them, I can’t follow you.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Lydia replies. “I’ve repeatedly visited the boys’ lacrosse team locker room. Doesn’t get much darker than that.”

The books take up such a height in her passenger seat that she swears they become another person, hard-edged and crookedly hewn. Inexplicably, she remembers her hospital bed, the gaping wound in her side, and waking every now and then to Allison, gaunt with guilt, not telling her what was really wrong.

Lydia drives. While she drives, she goes over all the things she reads. Physiology textbooks. Fable compilations. Literary anthologies. Articles splayed out on a computer screen whose black texts make her temples start to throb and swell in the latest hours of the night, the slivers of deepest dark before the sun crawls up over the horizon, and when the ache and pull begins inside her skull, she no longer needs to pluck strings to hear voices.

 

 

* * *

 

The first time it happens, she doesn’t tell Scott (who isn’t eating). She doesn’t tell Stiles (who isn’t sleeping). She doesn’t tell the one person she’d ever bother telling anything, because the graves have ears, you know. She tugs her lower lip under her teeth and watches her mascara thin and trail in cobweb shapes down her cheeks, and she clenches her jaw, and she listens.

_I’mhereI’mhereI’mhereDon’tcryIt’sokayI’mnotgoneCanyouhearmeTellmydadLydiaTellhimTheysayIcancomebackifyoucanfindme_

_But        don’t         put         yourself_

_to           any               trouble_

“You hear her, don’t you?” Stiles’s voice is brittle, now. He doesn’t go outside much. His skin has stayed pale and his hair has gotten a little thinner and the black mark behind his ear stays, and gets darker, and there are scars on his chest and back in the shape of lightning bolts from where Kira had driven steel through the nogitsune’s festering heart, and if he stands for too long, he usually faints. Reading isn’t much of an option anymore. His hands shake too much for him to be able to count his fingers.

Lydia hates his cleverness, and hates his inability to keep his questions to himself. That has always persisted, from even the time when he had not been able to sit still on the school bus for fierce need of knowing why the clouds were there some days and gone others.

“I don’t hear anything,” Lydia whispers, which is only a little bit of a lie, because after the rupture in her chest had pushed itself out of her every pore and tooth and blood cell and fingernail in an agonized wail of Allison’s (silver, moonlit, piercing) name, everything had plunged into silence like that which might linger at the bottom of the ocean, not because nothing had been there, but because Lydia had not wanted to hear it. She had wanted to be on lacrosse field bleachers again, contemptuous, unafraid, thinking herself especially good for taking in the new girl (who would soon take her in, and lie to her sometimes, but always drive the car when she was tired).

Stiles has to know that she’s lying; Lydia can’t imagine that _anyone_ would believe her, much less him, chronically unable to be ignorant of her smallest breaths and un-breaths. Miraculously, though, he stays quiet, rolling over under his quilt with a tiny shiver and closing his purple-edged eyes. He twitches and whines and speaks Japanese in his sleep:  _Onegai, onegai, Īe. Please, please, no._

An hour later, when he wakes fitfully (the way he always does), he croaks, “Just… just don’t tell Scott.”

Lydia flares indignantly. “Why not?”

Stiles shakes his head wordlessly, scrubbing a bony hand over his face.

“He can’t know,” he explains, every syllable seeming to exhaust him, “In case it… in case we can’t…”

“In case we can’t get her back,” Lydia finishes for him.

He nods.

“Do you think we can?” He looks up and his wet eyes meet hers, and Lydia holds his gaze, debates telling him the truth of her conviction, however delirious (but Lydia Martin doesn’t _do_ delirium; she does solutions and logic and straight-A’s and complex problem-solving skills): _I know we can. I know I can_.

“I don’t know,” she mutters, finally looking away.

The pause lasts so long that she’s sure he’s gone back to sleep, but then he asks, voice cracking into dry-earth fragments, “Do you think _you_ can?”

The setting sun makes his room bury its corners in smoldering orange. Lydia closes her book on Norse resurrection stories and offers Stiles a careful portion of a smile, masking the grimace inside of her as the voices crash against her eardrums with increasing fervor, drowning out any hope of distinguishing Allison’s from the crowd of the unsettled.

“I know I can,” she whispers, only when she’s sure that he’s slipped into sleep again, pallid joints curled fetally under his mother’s old blanket.

 

 

* * *

 

She takes Deaton’s words about tempting dark things to heart, but more in the sense that she will tempt them, and not the other way around, because Lydia, strawberry blonde hair going fire-bomb red in the late winter sun, paper-clawed fingers crooking themselves sore over keyboards and archives (and the locks on Chris Argent’s bestiaries and myth-books), is not a girl tempted by apples or devil-deals or anything of the like. And, honestly, she knows about all of the bits of starless night shifting between her ribs (forming the screams that rush out of her lungs like the howls of wolves); she knows about wandering the moors, and heralding death, and tying the dead between the spaces where her hair curls. She knows they’re there, but nothing, prior to the fall (no, the stumble) of Allison Argent, had been worth trawling them up for, so she had never bothered learning how. But Allison’s absence, now, leaves a hole in every bit of air they breathe; Allison’s absence carries more smothering presence than she ever did, and Lydia watches as Scott collapses under the weight of it and Isaac flees from it and Chris lets it swallow him whole. She is the only one who bothers to speak to it.

 _I         shot         an         arrow          intotheair_ , Allison whispers and stirs and sighs.

 _I’ll catch it_ , Lydia answers.

Everyone thinks the war is over when the nogitsune’s body curdles into shadow. Everyone thinks the war is over when they bury Allison beneath the frosted earth. But no, Lydia thinks. No, the war is only just starting, and war calls for humility, and war calls for cunning.

She raps her knuckles with poise against the steel warehouse door. Her palms are matted with the transferred ink of a dozen languages that jumble with the sounds of closing car doors, of coffee pots, of bowstrings. (Best friends don’t let each other die. Best friends will take no obstacles on the path to one another. That’s just how it’s done.)

“The banshee,” Peter Hale says, water and oil in a voice, venom in a smirk. “I was wondering when you’d drop by. Trying to undo the done, are you?”

Lydia steps past him, watches the dawn slipping in across the dusty floor, and works to breathe. Winter will be ending soon.

“How was the funeral?” Peter drawls. “So sorry I couldn’t make it; I had other engagements.”

Lydia bites down on the simmering hatred that inhabits her every vein and reminds herself that if anyone knows darkness, it’s him, him with the tearing teeth and the burned flesh and the tricks and the wolfsbane.   

“You’re going to help me,” she tells him frankly. Her hands find their way to her hips, but she doesn’t turn to face him, knowing that he isn’t worth the effort it would take her retinas to shape him.

“That hardly sounds like a polite request,” Peter sighs out. His footsteps thud as they approach her, and she doesn’t budge. “What happened to the girl with the good manners and the selfish heart?”

He reaches toward her shoulder, and she whirls, gripping his wrist and twisting it violently away from her. He barely cringes, being a werewolf, but Lydia bares her teeth at him like a wolf herself, digging her scarlet manicure into his skin.

“On temporary leave.” She simpers, clenching more tightly, and this time, he does flinch, and satisfaction surges in her. “Now. Let’s get started.”

 

 

* * *

 

_aim                             inhale                            love                        shoot_

_do                               not                            cry_

                                                   

 

                                                     _live_

  
  


 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Despite appearances to the contrary, I do have a definite direction for this.


End file.
